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Which distro do you believe deserves more recognition?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Whenever somebody recommends NixOS, I just want to spam the comments with Guix. I prefer configs I can understand, and I think lisp makes that easier. Other than syntax, the only thing I see is people complaining about the free-oftware-only. But the recently hyped distrobox solves that (together with the nonguix repo). Yet nobody recommends guix in all these "immutable" distro threads.
In my opinion Guix is the best mix of:
Arch (rolling release),
NixOS ("immutable", atomic updates , rollback, reproducible, declarative configs)
Gentoo (source code based, write your own package definitions for any source code you find),
with some lispy syntax.
I love the idea of guix, the syntax and docs seem much nicer, but the most important feature of NixOS for me is reproducability. If i'm installing all my software in distrobox, it is no longer reproducoble. Guix also seems to lack an alternative to Flakes.
Reproducibility is a big topic for Guix developers and users as well, just have a look at how many times they talk about that: https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/07/is-reproducibility-practical/
Also correct me if I'm wrong but I think Guix goes further on reproducibility than Nix, because everything they package is from source, whereas my understanding is that a lot of Nix packages are built from binaries.
Guix does have great reproducability. The person I was replying to was recommending people use distrobox for software that isn't packaged, I was saying that isn't reproducible.
The very large majority of nixpkgs is built from source, but there are a few apps that can't be built for whatever reason. This is still reproducible because it fetches a tagged version of the software and checks it against a hash.
Yes, that's true. You lose reproducibility by using distrobox. But so far I did not need distrobox on my Guix laptop, the nonguix repo was enough. It was just a suggestion for somebody caring more about availability of packages than reproducibility to use Guix as the stable base and distrobox on top.